I'm still just messing around with Pluto on some old computers while I'm building a nice core and media directors. After messing around a bit, i'm seeing some things that would make great additions to the Pluto system:

1) Voice Recognition - No, not completely interactive with microphones all over the house, but streamed from a cell phone or PDA (see 2 below)

2) BLuetooth Wireless Headset (for cell phones) - use this for the follow me as well as voice commands. For instance, most BT headsets have a button that you can press and hold while saying someones name for voice dialing. It would be nice with Pluto if this feature could be used somehow to send voice commands to the core. Also, if the BT headset could be tied into Asterisk, that would be amazing - it would be like wearing your phone on your ear all day - you would never miss a call.. Add this with the voice recognition and then you can be talking on the phone, hit the button on your ear to flash, then say the name of the person in the house to transfer the call to. Tons of possibilities here

3) Keep an eye on the nintendo Wii remote drivers - once they get it fully working, it would be a great "wireless mouse" for MD's. Kind of early right now, but i think it would be an amazing feature to have.

4) To Do Lists - I think Pluto can be more than just for Home Entertainment and automation - it should also help organize your life. A centralized To Do list would accomplish just that. When something is on your mind, put it on your To Do list. Then, each day when you turn on the TV, a reminder is given for items that aren't yet checked. Text and audion would be nice features

5) Going along with #4, some time of Reminders - scheduled daily, weekly, monthly etc.. Kind of like a cron system to remind you to pay your bills each month, change the furnace filter, etc...

6) Again, going along with helping organizing ones life - a nice calendar system. Again, it would be an easy and convenient way to manage your appointments, schedules, etc.

7) Music Visualizations (maybe Pluto already has this??)

Printer connectivity system - print out your To Do lists, print serve for your home PC's, print out your calendar, catalogs of your media, etc...

9) I know, not practical, but the MD and orbiter menu system - switching to HTML would make it much easier for users to make their own menu systems. (supporting PHP, javascript, etc)

THese are just off of the top of my head, I'd like to hear others feature suggestions....

- Green pluto The Core is running 24/7, with many disks, a heavy duty processor, many interfaces (IVTV, ...) MD are often full blow PCs.

All this consumes a lot of power.

It would be nice it the core would slow down when out of work. Many processor can do that today. When disks are not needed they could be standbyed Modern hard disks spin up time are VERY short. The Ivtv card are not needed 24/7 They could be turned off when not needed.

MD could go into deep sleep and woken up with USB/RS232/WOL You name it.

- But much more importantly I'd like a feature freeze and a cleanup In order to tune memory consumption (esp on MDs) Cleanup user interface of MD (there are a lot of small UI problems) Improve media support (Pictures, playlists, automatic thumbs, ...) Simplify user interface to make it really usable. Synchronize user interface through Mouse with remote control UI - There are differences depending of the type of control.

- And MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY put the repository back online. Without it there will be no more pluto.

well, pluto is the best home automation software that i ever seen!.. the voice recognition, as i've read in some posts, it's a bit dificult to implement..i don't know the reason.. but i think that is dificult due the voice recognition softwares avaliable in the open source world...however, (this is for the pluto staff also) there is a software called "cvoicecontrol" as well the KDE version "KvoiceControl" is not anymore under devlopment but it works very well!it would be a good ideia to get the sources, change it if needed, and add it to the pluto core..try install the cvoicecontrol in your core.. it should help the other qusetion about bluetooth headsets. This headsets work over the A2DP protocol.. there is an alsa subproject called "alsa-a2dp", its possible to select the sound output to any bluetooth mobile or headset, insted of the commom /dev/dsp*the only problem is that is works only in one way "just listen, don't talk" its possible to listen music in your mobile/headset, listen recorded messages from asterisk, but talk back seems impossible..

now guys.. these amazing system gets much power... the core and the media directors all the day running its a big problem..

i've an ideia that can help you a lot.. there is a low power computers called "PCI-104" it as the size of a floppy.. the have no fans, are quiet and consumes low power..the CPU's are almost them x86 compatible, from celerons clocked at 600Mhz to the Pentium4..as you can see, it is more than enougth to get the core running...check www.linuxdevices.com, there is a lot of information about these products

hi there cmorant, once again well i dont had installed plutohome into an PC-104 yet..the PC-104 is a bit old, it is the ISA equivalent on the PC's..nowadays we use PCI-104, it is the same, but with the PCI bus..the PCI-104 computers are stackable.. that means, you have the motherboard where you normaly have the CPU, on board ram, and a couple of serial ports.. if you need for example an ethernet card, you can buy an "PC-104 ethernet module", than you stack into the motherboard.. this can save a lot of space... cause the PC/PCI-104 is a standard almost every hardware that is valiable for convencional PC's, is avaliable for PC/PCI-104 as well, you can use flash cards insted of harddrives, for example.. to cut in the power consumption. Another important tip, is that the most modern PCI-104 already have the CPU, the VGA port, the on board memories, one or more ethernet ports, well a fully functional computer into one single board.. you dont need to buy any kind of module, unless you need some kind of soud card or USB for exampe..

i have only one small ramdisk running on an PCI-104, i use it only for embedded devlopment and experiments if you dont want to spent much money on PCI-104 hardware, take a look on ebay, you will find a lot of these units at excellent prices